Measurement, Collaborative Learning and Research for Sustainable Use of Ecosystem Services: Landscape Concepts and Europe as Laboratory

Policies at multiple levels pronounce the need to encompass both social and ecological systems in governance and management of natural capital in terms of resources and ecosystems. One approach to knowledge production and learning about landscapes as social–ecological systems is to compare multiple case studies consisting of large spaces and places. We first review the landscape concepts’ biophysical, anthropogenic, and intangible dimensions. Second, we exemplify how the different landscape concepts can be used to derive measurable variables for different sustainability indicators. Third, we review gradients in the three dimensions of the term landscape on the European continent, and propose to use them for the stratification of multiple case studies of social–ecological systems. We stress the benefits of the landscape concepts to measure sustainability, and how this can improve collaborative learning about development toward sustainability in social–ecological systems. Finally, analyses of multiple landscapes improve the understanding of context for governance and management.     

Web-Based Information System for Pollution Monitoring of Lake Ohrid

In this paper, we present a Web-based information system for pollution monitoring and analysis of Lake Ohrid. Our work is related to the ecological state of Lake Ohrid, which represents a rare natural ecosystem inhabited by many endemic and relict species. Aim of the study is to present the possibilities offered by the Web application, such as fast information access, support of distributed collaboration by information sharing instead of exchange, acquisition and analysis of pollutant data, database processing based on lake models, as well as GIS analysis. In this way, the data and the analysis are performed in one place and they are available to any user having only a Web browser.